Fall Crafts and Activities for Kids

We’ve been loving the Fall season this year, now that our kids are starting to get old enough to have fun on our little adventures — and we’re breaking through into a whole new world where nap times don’t always ruin our grand plans ;). Here’s some of our recent outings and fall crafts:

Adventures in Autumn

• Pumpkin patches

We went to a couple different pumpkin patches this year. One of them was a pretty big event, but we went on a weekday, so it wasn’t too intense. The kids loved the tractor ride, BIG-BIG slides, corn pits (these are so much fun!), pig shows, and duck races.

The other was a perfectly peaceful farm where the kids could pick pumpkins and all kinds of squash, and we could take some great photos with All The Colors. 🙂

“Let’s be peaceful”

Last year we visited a pumpkin patch — it was a brilliant, perfect Fall day and we went on a weekday so we had almost the whole place to ourselves. We ran around the (kid-friendly!) corn maze, ate caramel popcorn, picked little, tiny pumpkins just for fun, and rolled all around in the big troughs of dried corn. (If you haven’t tried this, do it!) While we ate our picnic lunch on a big grassy field, looking over green fields sprinkled with bright orange pumpkins under a clear blue sky, my 3 year old sighed and said, “Let’s be peaceful.” <3 ! That’s been a recurring phrase in our home ever since, and the boys have eagerly awaited the next pumpkin season so we could be peaceful again. 🙂

• Carving pumpkins

I cut the top (aka, “the hat”) off a couple of our pumpkins and showed the boys how to scoop out the seeds and “pumpkin guts.” They did NOT want to touch the stuff though … so we settled on using spoons and plastic scoopers.

Then I carved out some triangle eyes and something resembling a mouth. The boys loved (aka, fought over) pulling out the pieces after I cut them.

We saved the seeds and put the pumpkin guts in a plastic bag so they could squish them without getting their hands dirty. I ran across this idea on Pinterest from Samantha at stirthewonder.com. You can read her post here (https://www.stirthewonder.com/pumpkin-exploration/) or visit her site to see more of her fun activities. I just found out that she has tons of posts on using legos as math manipulatives and other learning tools — too cool! 🙂

• Roasting pumpkin seeds

I roasted the seeds using olive oil and sea salt. I love how they taste … but I really don’t like the feeling of ending up with a mouthful of wood shavings after chewing on them for a while. Maybe I’m just baking them wrong … or eating them wrong … or I’m just wrong … 0_o. I can’t handle not eating the oil and salt though, so I keep going back in. (I found this super simple recipe from Food Network: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/food-network-kitchen/pumpkin-seeds-recipe-2105941)

• Nature walk to collect leaves

We took some paper bags with us to the nearby park to collect pretty colored leaves. J was super excited about this — he was just as excited about finding leaves as he had been about finding Easter eggs. As he stood in a big pile of leaves, carefully surveying the scene, he would call out excitedly, “I found a leaf!,” then very carefully pick out one leaf from the thousands that were lying at his feet. Sometimes it’s nice to be two years old. 😉

Fall crafts with leaves

• I wanted to iron some leaves between layers of wax paper, because that’s a thing. But we didn’t have wax paper. 🙁 So I tried using parchment paper … I guess I did this wrong too because the paper didn’t stick to the leaves. It did nicely flatten the leaves though and gave them a bit of a shine, so we came up with a different project instead.

• We took a few of the flattened leaves and traced them on construction paper (using fall leaf colors). Then N got some fine motor skills practice as he tried to cut out the leaves. (This would have been a great chance to use our scrapbooking scissors to give the leaves fancy edges … but I didn’t think of it until later.)

• Then we put it all together on a huge sheet of brown paper for a mixed-media collage of fall art. We have it hanging on the wall at our computer station now. 🙂

I think this would be fun to do on a huge piece of butcher paper and display it across an entire wall. It would probably work better in a school setting than in a home though :). But if anyone wants to try it, here’s some ideas:

1. Collect colored leaves and iron them flat between layers of parchment paper.
2. Trace some of those leaves on colored paper (to get in some tracing and cutting skills, and to add variety to the overall look).
3. Draw in some simple trees with crayons across a large swath of butcher paper.
4. Have your kids glue on dried leaves, their cut-out leaves, sticks, rocks, pumpkin seeds, pinecones, feathers, … or anything else they find on a nature walk.
5. Display your class masterpiece on the wall and enjoy fall colors every day (for a week or two, until it gets gross ;).)
6. Send me a picture if you do this! I’d love to see how it turns out!

My Pinterest boards are full of more fun fall activities and crafts. You can find (and follow!) me on Pinterest at https://www.pinterest.com/sandrabethany/. What fun things have you done with your littles this fall?

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